(NaturalNews) Four days ago, the Associated Press reported that coal-fired power plants are dumping enormous quantities of pollutants into U.S. waterways. According to the Associated Press, the EPA says that coal-fired power plants are dumping nearly 2 million pounds of aluminum, 79,000 pounds of arsenic, 64,000 pounds of lead and even 2,820 pound of mercury each year into U.S. waterways.

There’s only one problem with all this reporting: nobody bothered to check their sources.

The original AP story turns out to have been “restructured” from old news, packaged to appear like breaking news for 2014 even though it actually traces back to 2009 (see below). AP actually featured the story in its “Big Story” section which implies that the stories published there are big, breaking news stories.

Associated Press quotes no one and cites no announcement or study

In its original story:

• AP never cited any person or department within the EPA.

• AP never linked to any announcement, publication, story or press release by the EPA.

• No scientific study was cited or named.

• No other news organization that ran the AP story bothered to check whether there was a legitimate source or scientific study to support these data. They simply ran the AP story word-for-word, without bothering to fact-check a single statement in the story.

The information actually goes back to an EPA paper published in 2009

I did a little digging on this — a journalistic habit which I fully realize makes the people at AP extremely angry, as no one is supposed to actually fact-check the “Ministry of Truth” on what it publishes. (Which is why the AP routinely gets away with such loose journalism and why Reuters is almost always a more trustworthy source for news.)

This PDF file describes the toxic effects of lead, cadmium, aluminum, mercury and so on.

So how did the Associated Press create a whole new story in 2014 based on old news from 2013 which was itself based on an old study from 2009? The AP simply “restructured” the story as if it were a recent announcement by the EPA, all while making sure nobody was actually cited in the story. I have no doubt that when this story ran a few days ago, the people at the EPA were scratching their heads and wondering, “Huh? Did we travel back in time or something?”

I wonder what it feels like to work at the AP and be able to just make up whatever news you want and magically have hundreds of mainstream media newspapers blindly copy and paste it onto their own websites without even asking for a single source or citation. For the record, folks, that’s not journalism. That’s an embarrassment to journalism.

The EPA has an important point in all this

I don’t disagree with the substance of the EPA’s concern, however. The EPA has an important point, and wastewater pollution from coal-fired power plants is a very big problem for our world. The routine release of arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury and other toxic elements into our world is justifiably alarming, and I’m personally seeing alarming evidence of this pollution showing up in my laboratory testing of foods for toxic heavy metals.

But the way in which AP dredged up a proposed rule from early 2013 and then managed to get this engineered story replicated across hundreds of other news websites — all while not citing a single source for their story — just smacks of the kind of abandonment of journalistic standards we’ve all come to expect from the Associated Press. Does anybody fact-check stories at the AP? Or is that too “old school” for the AP now?

The really sad part in all this is that neither the Washington Post, nor the Denver Post, nor ABC News nor anybody else bothered to fact-check this story, either. As far as I can tell, Natural News is the only news organization in the world who has fact-checked this story.

FYI, here’s what the AP says the EPA claims is being released into waterways each year in the U.S. via coal-fired power plants:

• Aluminum: 1.97 million pounds

• Arsenic: 79,200 pounds

• Lead: 64,000 pounds

• Manganese: 14.5 million pounds

• Mercury: 2,820 pounds

• Nitrogen: 30 million pounds

• Phosphorous: 682,000 pounds

• Selenium: 225,000 pounds

• Zinc: 4.99 million pounds

For the record, I don’t agree that nitrogen, phosphorous, selenium and zinc belong anywhere near the same threat category as lead, arsenic, mercury and aluminum.

Shades of Sandy Hook, eh? And in Canada, too. Is this an insider’s way of giving us proof that it was another premeditated false flag attack? I can’t believe it’s just another coincidence or sloppy execution with news releases for the media. It’s just too weird. ~ BP

Police, FBI: Shooter reported in military building at Washington Navy Yard; multiple victims

Police work the scene on M Street S.E. in Washington, where a gunman was reported in a military building at the Washington Navy Yard Monday, Sept. 16, 2013. Shots have been fired and employees directed to a shelter. Police and federal agents from multiple law enforcement agencies responded to the scene and streets in the area were closed. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

WASHINGTON – Several people were injured in a shooting Monday morning at a building at the Washington Navy Yard, the U.S. Navy said, and authorities searched for an active shooter.

A defence official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak during an active attack, also said there were at least several injuries.

The Navy said shots were fired around 8:20 a.m. (1220 GMT) at the Naval Sea Systems Command headquarters, where about 3,000 people work.

The number of the victims and their conditions was not immediately known, though the Navy said multiple people had been injured.

Police and federal agents from multiple law enforcement agencies responded to the scene. Ambulances were parked outside, streets in the area were closed and flights at Reagan National Airport were temporarily halted.

A U.S. Park Police helicopter hovered over the building and appeared to drop a basket or a stretcher with a person onto the roof.

Naval Sea Systems Command is the largest of the Navy’s five system commands and accounts for a quarter of the Navy’s entire budget. It builds, buys and maintains the Navy’s ships and submarines and their combat systems.

I’ll tell you what’s exciting about a fast-breaking news story like the Boston Bombings or the Waco fertilizer plant explosion—seeing the Google stats for the search word “false flag”. Check it out!

People are waking up and coming to the the “new” mainstream media for their news now—and I DON’T mean Twitter. Yes, we present all the information available—some of it speculation—but we also help people determine what the truth is, and why, because we present the information the TV media choose to leave out because of their agenda to spin a story in a misleading way as an arm of the dark cabal.

Journalists have a serious obligation to the public, similar to the Hippocratic Oath the members of the medical field take. To see the details of that obligation and understand the gross misconduct the mainstream media is guilty of today, click here.

Inspired by the events of the past week, here’s a handy guide for anyone looking to figure out what exactly is going on during a breaking news event. When you first hear about a big story in progress, run to your television. Make sure it’s securely turned off.

Now go outside and take a walk for an hour or two. Maybe find a park and sit on a bench, reading an old novel. Winter is just half a year away—have you started cleaning out your rain gutters? This might be a good time to start. Whatever you do, remember to stay hydrated. Have a sensible dinner. Get a good night’s rest. In the morning, don’t rush out of bed. Take in the birdsong. Brew a pot of coffee.

Finally, load up your favorite newspaper’s home page. Spend about 10 minutes reading a couple of in-depth news stories about the events of the day. And that’s it: You’ve now caught up with all your friends who spent the past day and a half going out of their minds following cable and Twitter. In fact, you’re now better informed than they are, because during your self-imposed exile from the news, you didn’t stumble into the many cul-de-sacs and dark alleys of misinformation that consumed their lives. You’re less frazzled, better rested, and your rain gutters are clear.

Breaking news is broken. That’s the clearest lesson you can draw about the media from the last week, when both old- and new-media outlets fell down on the job. By now you’ve likely heard the lowlights. CNN and the AP incorrectly reported on Wednesday that a Boston Marathon suspect had been arrested. People on Reddit and editors at the New York Postwrongly fingered innocent kids as bombing suspects. Redditors also pushed the theory that a Brown University student who has been missing for more than a month was one of the bombers—a story that gained steam on Twitter Thursday when people listening to police scanners heard the cops repeat the student’s name. Though everyone should have been careful to dismiss chatter heard over the scanner, few did. Caught up in the excitement of breaking news, I was one of many journalists who retweeted news that the Brown student was one of the suspects—a fact which, in the morning, I feel absolutely terrible about. People on Reddit feel terrible about it too, though now the damage to his reputation has been done. (Although I’m choosing not to mention his name here, that’s not going to accomplish very much—it’s already been stained.)

Twitter’s comeuppance could not have come soon enough. Earlier in the week, many social-media tough guys were calling CNN’s failing a sign of the times—proof that cable news couldn’t keep up with the Web. CNN was criticized for not taking the time to check its sources’ claims that the cops had arrested a “dark-skinned” suspect. The failure seemed in keeping with cable news’ inherent weaknesses. News takes time to develop, but because cable anchors have to fill up airtime and want to scoop their rivals, they’re eager to speculate and grab at any halfway credible sounding story they hear from their sources. Twitter, everyone on Twitter agreed, was better than that.

Then, a day later, people on Twitter made exactly the same mistakes. Besides the mistaken identification of the Brown student, Thursday night’s tweeters—including many local reporters covering the manhunt—couldn’t get straight whether one or two suspects had been arrested, whether the suspects were dead or alive, and whether they were light- or dark-skinned. Even more weirdly, many on Twitter were now making fun of CNN for being behind—for not following the news in the same slipshod manner as Twitter. By staying behind, though, CNN avoided the Web’s embarrassment. For all its mistakes, the network at least didn’t falsely identify anyone.

The useful distinction here isn’t by medium. It’s silly to say that Twitter is a better way to follow breaking news than CNN, or vice-versa. The real problem is that both Twitter and CNN now depend on technologies that make it possible to follow breaking news too closely.

We get stories much faster than we can make sense of them, informed by cellphone pictures and eyewitnesses found on social networks and dubious official sources like police scanner streams. Real life moves much slower than these technologies. There’s a gap between facts and comprehension, between finding some pictures online and making sense of how they fit into a story. What ends up filling that gap is speculation. On both Twitter and cable, people are mostly just collecting little factoids and thinking aloud about various possibilities. They’re just shooting the shit, and the excrement ends up flying everywhere and hitting innocent targets.

For a lot of people, it’s exciting to get caught up in a fast-breaking story. I’d like to tell you that the next time something big breaks, I’ll stay away from Twitter. I hope that I do. But I worry that’s just my news hangover talking. For all the blind alleys, I do have a lot of fun following the news in real time, and I find it hard to stay away. Maybe you do, too. If you’re that sort of person, feel free to stay glued to Twitter and cable. Just be sure to exercise caution about what you tweet and retweet—after last night, I know I’ll be able to do at least that much. And just remember, for all the time you spend online, you won’t be any better informed than a guy who spent all day cleaning his gutters.